Maybe nothing we do now will matter in a thousand years, but IF SO, then it also would seem that nothing that will matter in a thousand years makes a difference now, either. In particular, it doesn’t make a difference now that in a thousand years, what we do now won’t matter. –JAP

Life is momentary. There are happy moments and sad moments and to experience life to its fullest you must stay in the moment. I think I understand what all the monks meditating out there are doing. They are making a valiant effort to stay in the present moment.

I submit this is impossible to do because there is no such thing as the present moment. The future is feeding on the past.

It takes more energy for good to reside in evil than it does for evil to reside in good.

…. and not bad is better than pretty good.

🙂

The world is fleeting, and so am I. Maybe I should learn to surf instead of drowning.

… of scripture and their intellectual dishonesty is more than skin deep. You guessed it, it goes right down to the bone.

When a religion is good, I conceive it will support itself; and when it does not support itself, and God does not take care to support it so that its professors are obliged to call for help of the civil power, ’tis a sign, I apprehend, of its being a bad one.”

–Benjamin Franklin

I am disgusted by the cult of personality dominating the media at the moment. Wake up people. There are more pressing issues in the world than the death of Peter Pan and a Charlie’s Angel. I wish that the media would just let MJ’s memory be rather than drag it around for days like some carcass of a once-proud show horse paraded around for the sake of sentimentality and ratings.”

Theists are afraid people will think for themselves; atheists are afraid they won’t.

Science has given us much. What has theology given us?

Theology has given us hell.

Here is the list Moses got the third time around, the final authorized, edited and proofed version of the Ten Commandments:

1. Thou shalt worship no other god. (The same as Exodus 20; so far so good.)
2. Thou shalt make thee no molten gods. (So, graven images are okay now!)
3. The feast of unleavened bread shalt thou keep. (My family never did this.)
4. Six days thou shalt work, but on the seventh day thou shalt rest. (Another match with Exodus 20.)
5. Thou shalt observe the feast of weeks. (What is this? When is this?)
6. Thrice in a year shall all your menchildren appear before the Lord God. (Boys only? And how, exactly, do they get up there every four months?)
7. Thou shalt not offer the blood of my sacrifice with leaven. (What?)
8. Neither shall the sacrifice of the feast of the passover be left until the morning. (Because the meat will spoil overnight?)
9. The first of the firstfruits of thy land thou shalt bring unto the house of the Lord thy God. (This applies to farmers, so most of us are off the hook.)
10. Thou shalt not seethe a kid in his mother’s milk. (No problem. That one’s easy to keep.)

These are the real Ten Commandments? They only have a 20 percent match with Exodus 20. Did the rules change between Moses’ visits? Did God lose his memory? What happened to homicide, theft and perjury. Is adultery okay now?

If I were still a Xian, I might be embarrassed that the God I thought I admired could be so forgetful and so petty. Not to mention so weird.

• Anger at religious immorality
• Disgust with superstitious anti-intellectualism
• Fear of the dangers of Xian intolerance
• Dissatisfaction with the way religious divisiveness interferes with true compassion
• Empathy for the victims of sectarian bigotry
• Outrage at the hypocrisy of believers
• Impatience with the churches that actively retard social progress.

Atheism is exquisitely vulnerable to disproof. Theism is not.

Most Xians and Muslims would rather earn devotion points within their co-believing community than give any credibility to some Lone Ranger atheist.

The issue is not so much what we think, but how we think. Epistemology.

Every religion in the world believes that every other religion is superstition. And they’re all correct.

That fine line between gaining an insight and relinquishing a blind spot.

Open your eyes
So I can understand
The true meaning of brown….

Close your eyes so
I can ask you to open your eyes
once more.

http://strangemaps.wordpress.com/2009/03/30/270-palestines-island-paradise-now-with-a-word-from-its-creator/

An excerpt from the map’s creator:

The Bible contains at least two stories equating the aquatic with the amoral. As Red Sea pedestrians, Moses and the Israelites didn’t even get their sandals moist, while the Lord did some expert smiting on the pursuing Egyptians, by way of the gurgling waters closing in on them. And a few thousand years earlier, Noah kept his binary boatload afloat while all the rest of humanity (and the now extinct species of the animal kingdom) met their watery grave.

… and Everything can be Nothing.

😉

I just love doing this magazine. For one thing, it allows me to get out of the house every so often, which in turn helps me work on my people skills, if you know what I mean.

Also, it’s nice to be able to stay up on what’s happening in the Middle East, the current cauldron causing all sorts of catastrophes. When will we ever learn? Perhaps that is the purpose of human life. And since we haven’t learned yet, perhaps purpose is something that is unachievable. Therein lies the rub.

Why do I keep going back to having no purpose has its purpose? There might just be something to it.

😉

There are several examples of having the facts without knowing the entire process that are accepted as true today. One example of not understanding the process but knowing the process is fact is photosynthesis, that is a plant’s ability to make sugar. We can see the carbon dioxide and the water go into the plant, we can trace those compounds to the chloroplasts and we can measure the sugar that comes out, but we have no idea of how it happened. Yet, photosynthesis is a fact. Another example is gravity. We know that gravity is the attraction of all matter. We do not know why. We have some theories about gravitational attraction, but none are proven. Yet the effects of gravity are measurable and predictable. Gravity is a fact of nature. We do not claim gravity is a theory just because we do not know how it works. There are several measurable natural phenomena that we can predict and use for human benefit, but the how and why may not clearly be known.

Evolution is one of those natural facts.

Question: What side of the stem cell fence do you come down on?

Answer: If God created man in his image, maybe we’ve all just degenerated from whatever it is floating around in that petri dish…. Come on, I’ll buy you a drink.